Still not tired of the winning
Joe doakes

“Faster, please”
— Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds

The California State Assembly – font of most stupid at the state level in the US, these days, at least in significant states (shaddap, Connecticut) has passed, and seems ready for a signature by Governor Newsom (who is to governors what the State Assembly is – see above) a bill re-classifying independent contractors into employees.

Y’know. So they have to give them benefits.

This should work about as well as forcing up minimum wages.

Look – the “gig economy” looks like a terrible place to have to make one’s living. And it’s a shame we have a huge population of terribly educated 20-somethings who seem to have given themselves no choices but to live in it, writing listicles and proofreading resumes and sharing rides.

But the only thing worse than a crummy, exploitive job is no job at all.

Which is what a lot of Uber and Lyft drivers in California are about to have.

A friend of the blog writes:

The past week, neighborhood social media has been worked up over a shot fired at the Hamline light rail station. Reports are varied on what actually happened. And, yes, gun shots and other violence that is caused by gang activity, drug addiction, etc is scary. I really would rather not encounter it. Hundreds of comments blaming the BP gas station.
But, the hysteria reminds me of last year’s frenzy over the Starbucks drive through off of Marshall Avenue. Yes, a bad driver not paying attention can pull out and hit a pedestrian or bicyclist. And it could be a young person who doesn’t quite yet master the skill of looking at the surroundings. It could be an elderly person who can’t move out of the way fast enough.
I wouldn’t want my loved ones to die any of these ways.
What do both of these have in common? In both cases, the pitchfork crowd is screaming to shut down the business versus deal with the actual problem.
There are bad drivers out there. Ticket them. Fine them. Take away their license. Starbucks and the drive through is not the issue.
There are bad people out there. Arrest them. Rehab them or keep them in jail. Walmart, Taco Bell, BP are not the problems (unless the BP at Hamline is indeed a front, then the franchise owner is also to blame. They are apparently selling something the city council banned, so there is that).
Why can we not admit that there are bad people and we need to do something about them, not everyone?

Ooh! Ooh! I got this one!

Because Saint Paul is run, in effect, by a crowd of biddies and ninnies from Merriam and Highland Parks whose entire frame of reference is organizing to get rid of things in Their Backyards that annoy them.

Smoky bars.

Hot rods on University Avenue during Back to the Fifties.

Trash truck rolling their alleys.

Any business that crosses them.

Pretty soon, snowplows in the alley.

It’s really all these people know.

Newly elected St. Louis councilwoman takes oath of office with hand on Dr. Seuss book.  What a nincompoop. 
An Oath is a promise made to God.  A promise made to a person can be broken with minimal consequences, but breaking a promise to God brings everlasting torment in the fires of Hell.  That’s why taking an Oath on a Bible is a solemn occasion.  You are literally pledging your eternal soul as collateral that you will keep your word.
If we no longer believe in Hell, or torment, or God, then the Oath means nothing because breaking it has no consequences.  And if breaking a promise has no consequences, it’s not really a promise, it’s a statement of intention, an aspiration, a wish.
No-fault divorce turned the marriage vow into a marriage “for now.”  Taking an oath on Dr. Seuss makes you an oaf. Do it right, or don’t do it at all.
Joe Doakes

That’s one reason I don’t have much patience for some of the “Teh Shareeah is Coming!” crowd yapping about Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib taking their oaths of office on the Koran rather than the Bible. Taking an oath on a book that’s not, in fact, the center of one’s world view (provided one has a world view), then it’s about as morally illustratrive as…

…well, read Joe’s example.

Yesterday I was listening to “All Things Considered” on the way to something more interesting.

The subject was “what are we doing to combat the kind of fake news that, we are told, affected the 2016 election”.

The guest – one Paul Barrett, an adjunct professor at NYU who lectures about election security for some reason or another – said that one thing that could help might be for social media companies (and, one might suppose, media companies in general) to “act more aggressively against provably false information”.

I couldn’t agree more, although I suspect that’s not the kind of cynical deception they’re thinking about.

Let’s start with sanctioning people who passed on Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom’s provably false claims about gun rights issues, especially proposals to reform self-defense laws – a trail of lies that continues today.

Professor Barrett also says individuals need to be more skeptical about what they read and see online. This is something no conservative in the Strib’s coverage area needs to be reminded about.

Watching “progressives” and socialists (ptr) complaining about the inevitable results of their own policies:

Rent has gotten to extortion-level highs in New York City, and there’s a whole lot of lawbreaking that happens because so many working people are on the brink.

Housing is a right. NY’s rent laws must be enforced if abusive, predatory actors are breaking them. https://t.co/RjeHQ1SURp

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 7, 2019

Seventy years of rent control, rigid zoning, tenant-centered policy, official hostility to private landlords, and suffocating regulation “in the public interest”, and a decent lifestyle in Manhattan is unavailable for less than half a million a year?

Who’da thunk it!

Joe Biden says the Constitution doesn’t guarantee the right of Every American to own a gun.  He is correct.  I agree with him.  There you go: we have bi-partisan agreement that the Second Amendment does not guarantee every person the right to own a firearm.
Of course we agree – as far as it goes.  Conservatives think only sane law-abiding adults should own guns.  Liberals think only government agents should own guns. So we agree in principle that there are limitations.  But as always, the devil is in the details.  And that’s where Democrats continue to do their endless lying.
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.  True, if he agrees to work for a nickel a day.  Oh, he won’t?  Well, then I guess you’ll have to switch doctors.  But that’s your doctor’s choice, we didn’t mandate the change, so it’s not our fault that you couldn’t keep your doctor.
A person who beats and abuses his wife shouldn’t own a gun.  Well – “beats,” sure, physical violence, we agrfee.  “Abuses,” what does that mean?  “He cut up my credit cards because I spent us into bankruptcy, which left me unable to self-medicate my mental illness with shopping therapy, which made me feel bad, which is mental abuse.”  So that person isn’t allowed to own?  Which one, the abuser or the nutcase.
Democrats desire to be Procrustes, forcing equal outcomes for everyone, but they know the public doesn’t want to fit the bed.  So Democrats resort to endless, endless lies.  Just tiresome.
Joe Doakes

This isn’t news to anyone that’s been following the gun “debate” for the past couple decades.

Getting the entire rest of the population to figure it out is the hard part.

Find out more about Child Protection League Action and “Comprehensive Sex Ed”, and go to the rally at the Capitol on 9/22.

Rally information is here.

Join us today on the Northern Alliance Radio Network!

Today:

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• Michelle Lentz of Child Protection League Action will join me to discuss their rally at the capitol on 9/22 to warn people about CSE (Comprehensive Sex Ed),

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I was listening to NPR on the way to work this morning when I first heard the news of Robert Mugabe’s passing.

And I listened to the story, waiting for them to get to the bits about the organized thuggery, the North Korean mercenaries, the hyperinflation, and the collapse of the economy with its attendant hypermisery.

I waited through hagiographic hosannas about his “pan-africanism” and “anti-colonial vision”.

And I waited.

And I waited.

Eventually – two minutes into the story – it popped up. For a bit.

Even the NYTimes couldn’t see fit to bury the lede on this one.

When Ilhan Omar starts attacking the Strib – which has been rhetorically painting her toenails ever since the beginning of her state-managed-to-a-fault career – you might be forgiven for wondering if the wheels aren’t starting to fall apart over at Team Ilhan.

Scott sums up where the Omar story was as of earlier in the week.

The scandal has pushed the incredible panoply of scandals we have covered in depth on Power Line into the background: the identity fraud, the marriage fraud, the immigration fraud, the tax fraud.
In the past three weeks I have circled back to interview sources whom I have found to be highly reliable in the Omar saga. They open a window onto the scandals from the perspective of Ahmed Hirsi, her long-time partner and the father of her three children. According to sources, Hirsi is telling friends:
• that he will not go to jail for Omar;
• that while Omar did indeed marry her brother (Ahmed Elmi) for fraudulent purposes, Hirsi did not know at the time that she had married Elmi;
• that Omar is threatening Hirsi he would be in trouble along with her if the truth were to come out;
• that Omar has asked him to state publicly that all is well with their marriage even though it is completely done and finished; and
• that in fact they are living apart and have been divorced under Islamic law (although they remain legally married).
Having humiliated Ahmed Hirsi by her affair with Tim Mynett, Omar now wants Hirsi to perform public relations services for her to suppress the scandal. That is cold.

While hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, a husband tossed under the bus for a newer model can do a lot more than write country-western songs. I’m kinda rooting for Hirsi.

And without Power Line and Scott Johnson, the story – her alleged fake marriages, immigration and identity fraud, her tax problems, to say nothing of the philandering – would have stayed safely buried.

Illegal immigrants who snuck into Mexico detained at the border, angry because they aren’t allowed to continue to the United States.
Did I mention they’re illegal aliens from Africa?  Desperately trying to get into the most racist nation on Earth, founded on slavery, hoping – no – demanding the opportunity to be oppressed by White Americans.
“Assembly of African Migrants.”  If they ever get here, I’m sure they’ll make good little Democrats.  They’ve already formed a union.
Joe Doakes

When the entire world believes being in America is an entitlement? The Progs have won.

Eric McCormick calls for a blacklist of Trump supporters in Hollywood:

Hey, @THR, kindly report on everyone attending this event, so the rest of us can be clear about who we don’t wanna work with. Thx. https://t.co/7W3xPG3bI2

— Eric McCormack (@EricMcCormack) August 30, 2019

Your first question might be “Who in the flaming hootie-hoo is Eric McCormick. Truth is, I had to ask, myself. Turns out he was in the once-upon-a-time hit TV show Will and Grace.

Which I watched maybe twice. It was basically Friends, but with characters.

Anyway, where were we?

Oh, yeah. Eric McCormack accidentally voicing the inner id of “progs”

We know it was an accident, because Mr…let me look back up to the top…McCormick is trying to walk it back. I suspect a social media spanking was involved.

SCENE: Mitch Berg is walking through the Midway. He rounds a blind corner, and nearly runs into Avery LIBRELLE.

LIBRELLE: Merg!:

BERG: Oh, gooooouuuuuuuaaaaaaahhhey, Avery. How you doing?

LIBRELLE: Fine. Just one my way to the Midway Walmart to buy handgun ammunition.

BERG: Hey, Avery – remember when you proposed using the government’s “terrorism watch list” to keep people from owning guns?

LIBRELLE: I must have.

BERG: You did. And do you remember your response?

LIBRELLE: No.

BERG: You said I, and gun owners, were being “paranoid”.

LIBRELLE: You are.

BERG: Not so much:

The [San Francisco] board of supervisors passed a resolution on Tuesday officially labeling the gun rights’ group a domestic terrorist organization.
District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whose district includes the Marina and Presidio, wrote the declaration stating that the NRA “spreads propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence.”
It said the NRA “musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence.”
“All countries have violent and hateful people, but only in America do we give them ready access to assault weapons and large-capacity magazines thanks, in large part, to the National Rifle Association’s influence,” the declaration read.

:

BERG: In other words, you people label everyone you disagree with “Terrorists”.

LIBRELLE: Well, if the San Francisco City Council says so. It’s science, after all.

BERG: Of course. Hey, Avery?

LIBRELLE: Huh?

BERG: I’m an NRA member.

LIBRELLE: [Turns and runs in a wild-eyed panic]

BERG: [Whispers to self]Well, thanks for that, anyway, San Francisco…

And SCENE

Trump winning the cold war against China using a variation of the Reagan strategy: make them compete against our economy. 
Liberals don’t understand our economy, so they don’t understand why the strategy worked last time and can’t see it working this time.  Only someone with a lifetime of experience in capitalism can see it. 
So any small business owner or self-employed person gets it.  Whether that’s enough people to carry him to re-election, remains to be seen.

Big Left has done a good job of making sure there are a smaller proportion of people who understand much of anything, anymore.

Not to cast aspersions, since the only “evidence” I have is an uncanny coincidence.

But it seems almost uncanny, the way mouth-breathing “threats” “against” Rep. Ilhan Omar tend to pop up into the news when disorderly elements of the media start poking where they aren’t supposed to poke, into news of Rep. Omar’s marriage, philandering, campaign finance issues and tax problems.

Last week, as bits and pieces of the local DFL PR firm we call our “media” started to get shamed into, y’know, covering the news, and the depravity of DFL rank and file started edging into i headlines, , that this “death threat” suddenly ate up a news cycle or two:

Now, we don’t know who wrote this, and it’s for certain we’ll never find out due to local media’s efforts (although I’d like to know where William Davis was last week).

But of course, this takes us back to February, 2018 – on the hard-fought caucus night where Omar and the West Bank “progressive” machine needed to gin up turnout to beat out some strong “moderate” DFLers, this was “slipped under the doors” of some Cedar Riverside apartments by “Trump Supporters” who, notwithstanding the cameras and scads of Somali witnesses all over the place, seemed to disappear, zephyr-like, without a trace all night long:

The local party “community organizer” promised an investigation, which went as far and as fast as all ward heelers’ “investigations” always do.

So have at it, hive mind. Similarities? “Tells?”

Let’s DanRather ’em.

Democrat political strategist David Axelrod warns a vacancy on the Supreme Court would tear the nation apart.
I don’t see how.  Not if Democrats follow the Constitution.  The President nominates some jurist, the Senate confirms her, the nation moves on.
The only way a problem could arise is if Democrats decide not to follow the Constitution, if they decide to stage a revolution to overthrow the Constitution through violence.  That would tear the nation apart.
So what’s Axelrod saying: Democrats intend to tear the nation apart over one lousy Supreme Court seat? 
If we’re looking at a threat to the nation’s very existence, maybe Trump should look to historical precedent, consider some of Abraham Lincoln’s tactics.  Call up the National Guard to maintain order?  Suspend habeas corpus.  Jail dissidents without charges or trial.  Harsh, but to save the nation, justified.  And who could fairly complain – they brought it on themselves.
Joe Doakes

I’m all for doing all of that with those that want to abolish the Electoral College. The SCOTUS, even moreso.

Channel 9, being as it is the worst water-carrier for the DFL among the four major TV stations in the market, bends over backwards to find false equivalence in the goings-on at the State Fair, during which a female GOP volunteer was sexually assaulted, goons threatened female staffers, and more mundane assaults were a daily matter:

“Every day at our booth, (things happen),” [GOP chair Jennifer] Carnahan said. “People will spit on our volunteers in their faces, people will take beer and dump it over our merchandise. I had a woman take garbage and throw it in my face last Wednesday and tell me I was trash.”

While at the DFL booth…er…(I’m adding emphasis):

[DFL chair Ken] Martin said Democrats decided to install surveillance cameras inside their booth for 2019 because of incidents in previous years

Presumably every bit as legitimate as Ilhan Omar’s “death threat”.

Ken Martin adds a plaintive plea:

“This fair is supposed to represent the best of Minnesota, not the worst,” Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota DFL, said in an interview outside his booth. “We just have to find a way to de-escalate this. It’s sad that this is where our politics have gotten to.”

It’s simple, Ken. Tell your supporters to stop behaving like such a bunch of f***ing animals about politics.

A friend of the blog writes:

When the Highland Park dwelling Executive Director for Union Park District Council wags his finger at people asking what they can do to get vagrants away from their bedroom windows, telling them “just advocate for more housing” and the reality is, these vagrants don’t want housing, they just want freedom to shoot up wherever, whenever- 

Mr. Long – who, as a “district council” employee is in effect a double-A farm club player for the Saint Paul DFL machine – will never have to face any consequences for his belief, since homeless, addicted people are worth more to his real bosses, the DFL, as drug-addicted vagrants than not.

Too much water in the Great Lakes. Global warming.

Not enough water in the Great Lakes.  Global warming.

Or maybe it’s just natural variation?

But definitely, the solution is for you to quit driving your car and pay more taxes.  Definitely. 

Joe Doakes

I’m trying to imagine a “climate science journalist” taking my high school’s chemistry class…

It was seventy years ago this morning that Germany invaded Poland, launching World War II in Europe – beginning what was, in a sense,the end of a war that’d begun 25 years earlier, taken a 21 year break, and then re-ignited, killing tens of millions of people directly on the battlefield and, in ways never before seen in human history, off of it.
In another sense, it began the final act of the Old World – the world of European dominance, of its kingdoms and alignments and customs defining “civilization” for the rest of the world – and was the beginning of the world we have today, a world who’s denouement is at this moment very much in play.

But that’s a story we’ll recap in seventy more years, God willing.

———-

In reading the story of the German Blitzkrieg into Poland most of my cognitive life, I became fascinated with the history of Poland – or, really, of all of the smaller European states that Hitler swallowed up.  A lot of legends sprang up around each of these nations and their record during the awful year that followed the invasion of Poland.

I would like to address some of them.

———-

Poland started the war with a couple of strikes against it.

For starters, its terrain is just not defendable.

All of its major cities sit on a broad, flat plain, cut by few rivers (whose banks are, largely, not major obstacles to much of anything).  The road from the German or Russian border to the capitol in Warsaw, or its industrial heartland around Katowice/Sosnowiec, or its intellectual and cultural heart in Krakow has no more physical speed bumps than a drive from Fargo to Grand Forks.

And while Poland knew very well that it was surrounded by a couple of rapacious dictatorships who, as they had through all of history, meant it nothing but ill, and they did their best to prepare for eventualities, they did something that’s all too familiar to modern IT executives; at a time in history when military technology was evolving at a pace that the world had never before seen (and in many respects hasn’t seen since), the Poles, like the French, laid their cards on the table early, standardizing and mass-producing equipment that turned out to be obsolete a mere 5-10 years after it rolled off the assembly line.  The Polish Air Force was mass-producing the Pzl fighter plane and the Karas fighter-bomber at a time when the Germans had just started developing the planes with which they’d launch the war, the Bf109 fighter, the Ju87 Stuka dive bomber, the He111/Do17/Ju88 bombers.

(The French military, like the British navy, likewise bet long on mid-thirties technology that served it less effectively than later designs). Likewise, they built thousands of tiny, two-man machine-gun armed “tankettes”, state of the art in 1933 but useless as anything but mobile machine guns in 1939 against the German tanks that were just going up on the drawing boards.

By 1939, Poland was just starting to produce the excellent “7TP” tanks – as good as any German Panzer…

…but it was too little and too late.

To help make up for that, the Poles had a few advantages; the Air Force’s pilots were spectacularly well-trained; indeed, the Polish pilots who escaped after the Blitz to the UK, and got to fly first-rate modern fighters like the Hurricane and the Spitfire in 1940 turned out to be among the RAF’s highest scorers in the Battle of Britain.

In the days before radar, they were supported by a large, comprehensive ground observer network that did a surprisingly good job of detecting German air raids and vectoring Polish fighters onto the target.  The Polish Navy, in contrast (and as an ironic result of its relatively lower standing at budget time) standardized rather later, and went to war with some of the finest equipment in all of Europe; the Blyskawica-class destroyers and Orzel-class submarines (both built in Holland) were among the best anywhere, certainly outclassing anything in the German or British navies.  And, since they were standardized late and in dire  economic times, there were exactly two of each in service.

The Poles had one other thing; centuries of vassaldom to the Germans and Russians.  Other than the brief Republic of Krakow in the mid-1700’s, and the 21 years of independence (marked by a war for survival against the Soviets), Poland had been under one boot or another since the end of the Jagiellonian era. The Poles wanted their freedom.  And even though the government in 1939 was at least partly a dictatorship – a response to a paralyzing indecision in the face of both the Great Depression and the gathering threat from east and west – Poland was an outpost of small-“l” liberal sentiment.  It also built an intellgience service that, like that of many counteries surrounded by enemies (see Israel), disproportionally excellent; indeed, Polish Intelligence helped with one of the great coups of the war; it was the Poles that made the first inroads into breaking Germany’s “Enigma” encryption system.  The Polish mathematicians fled to the UK, and joined with the British thinkers at Bletchley Park to complete the job.  The fact that the Allies could read Germany’s “secret” transmissions in near-real-time (by cryptology standards) was one of the key factors in winning the war; without that, the U-Boat offensive in 1941-43 would have likely succeeded in starving Britain to the negotiating table with Hitler.

Unlike France – misconceptions about whom we’ll address on their own 70th anniversary, in about eight months – this gave Poland a deep will to fight.

It wasn’t enough, of course – but it came a lot closer to evening things up than contemporary propaganda credits them.
———-

Two myths grew up around the German invasion of Poland; that the Polish Air Force was destroyed on the ground in the opening minutes of the campaign, and that the Polish Army’s cavalry was such a medieval throwback, it resorted to charging at tanks with lances.

Both are propaganda myths spread by the Germans and parrotted, in a story all too familiar to modern consumers of news, by an incurious, uninformed Western news media.

———-

The Polish Air Force was not caught on the ground.  Far from it; they dispersed away from their major airfields, according to pre-war plans that recognized not only the Luftwaffe’s superiority in numbers and equipment – by this point, German bombers could outrun Polish fighter planes – but Poland’s few aces in the hole.

And when the German bomber streams started appearing over Poland, the observers saw and heard them, and phoned in the information to HQ, who vectored Poland’s old fighters into position to do the only thing they realistically could against planes that were faster than their own; wait in ambush over the targets, take the most direct approach they could to their targets, and fight like hell.

And they did.  The Polish Air Force shot down over 230 German planes during September of 1939, about 250 more were damaged, many of them beyond repair.  The Lotnictwo Wojskowe lost about 100 shot down or otherwise destroyed by enemy action, with about as many being lost as the pace of the German advance, and later the Russian invasion, made repairs impossible and swallowed up the warning network and, finally, teh airfields themselves.

Following the goverment’s instructions, as the fight in central Poland became impossible, they retreated to the mountains in the south, and after the surrender made their way, by air or car or foot, first to Romania, then through Africa or Iran or the Mediterranean, then to France (where many fought with the French air force) and finally Britain or the USSR.

———-

The other legend – the horse-cavalry charges with bugles blowing and lances waving – is more pernicious.  It’s a propaganda legend, of course, one started as a German reponse to a Polish tactical victory.

In the opening days of the war, Poland had plenty of horse cavalry; they were in the process of trying to retired horses in favor of tanks and armored cars, but the Depression had slowed the process (as it did, by the way, in the US, whose cavalry was still largely horse-mounted in 1939 as well).  They didn’t fight in the classic sense of the term; think of them as infantry on horses, using the greater mobility of being mounted to help cover more ground, but dismounting to fight on foot when the action started.  And while they had lances, they were for ceremonial occasions only; they weren’t carried in the field.  There was never an intention to fight the way cavalry had always fought – the saber charges, the bugles, the mounted dashes.

Usually.

In the opening days of the war, a squadron of Pomeranian cavalry under Colonel Julian Filipowicz, patrolling in the corridor below Gdansk (Danzig, at the time), encountered a German infantry battalion which, tired from advancing and from a brisk fight with a Polish infantry unit across some nearby railroad tracks, was resting in an open field.

Col. Filipowicz’ unit – about 300 cavalrymen – while scouting the area, found the Germans.  As is so often the deciding factor in modern war, they saw the Germans first, and were able to act accordingly.  They deployed some modern weapons – Browning M2 machine guns, first built in 1918 and still found on every US Army tank today – to back up a charge led by some very old weapons, the cavalry saber.  Filipowicz, seeing an unprepared foe, ordered a charge.

And it cut the German battalion to pieces, killing dozens, wounding hundreds, and leaving the battalion combat-ineffective for quite some time.

As the Poles completed several passes, a unit of German armored cars happened on the scene, and turned their cannon and machine guns on the Poles, causing heavy losses and sending them back into the woods, to fight another day.

German photographers, travelling with a group of tanks that responded to the debacle, photographed a number of the dead Polish troopers alongside the Panzers.  The German propagandists spread the report –  the Poles were stuck in the medieval era! – as a morale booster.  And the tall tale, rather than the story of the boundless courage of Filipowicz’ men, stuck.

———-

It wasn’t the last bloody nose the Poles gave the Germans.  When the Germans pushed the Poles back to Warsaw, they tried to storm the city using the same tanks that had led them across the North Polish Plain.  The Sixth Panzer Division was ordered to attack the city.

The tanks moved into the warren of streets that made up Warsaw’s western suburbs…

…and got swallowed in a morass of antitank guns, molotov cocktails (which wouldn’t earn their name until the following winter, from the Finns, about whom more in a couple of months) and booby traps.

The Sixth Panzers lost sixty tanks – about a third of its armored strength – in the first day of its assault, a catastrophic hit.

Warsaw would have to fall the old-fashioned way – through infantrymen advancing from house to house.

———-

Or through treachery.

Stalin, as part of his temporary alliance with Hitler, invaded Poland about this time, destroying whatever hope for resistance that the Poles might have had.  It was all she wrote.

Oh, they fought on anyway; tens of thousands of Poles went to the UK or the USSR to carry on the war; hundreds of thousands more fought with the various guerrilla groups, the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) which hampered German movements throughout the war and in 1944, as the Soviets approached, seized control of much of Warsaw (and were beaten down as the Soviets stopped in the city’s eastern suburbs and refused to cross the Vistula River).  The Poles, realizing their excellent but tiny navy had no chance, ordered their most modern ships – their destroyers and submarines to feel to the UK in the opening hours of the war; Orzel, brand new out of the shipyard, ran to Sweden, and was interned (placed under arrest, essentially).  The crew escaped, and stole the sub from the docks; the Swedes had seized all the boat’s charts and navigational gear, so it sailed across the Baltic, and through the treacherous Skagerrak, and across the North Sea by guess and by gosh.

The Poles had scant hope holding against Hitler from the west; against both of their hereditary enemies, they had none.  The clock ran out fast on the Poles.  The nation’s story was one of the great tragedies of the past 100 years; winning their freedom, having it seized, held hostage by one dictator and then another for two generations.

It’s also one of the great inspirations; after all that, they took their freedom back…

….and with it catalyzed a shot at freedom for the rest of the Second World.